Octagon House, by Phoebe Atwood Taylor (1937)

(McElroy House in San Francisco, 1861)

Phoebe Atwood Taylor, writing in the 1930s and 1940s, is the creator of the "hayseed" sleuth, or the "codfish Sherlock," Asey Mayo. Asey does most of his sleuthing on Cape Cod.

What is an Octagon House?

Octagon houses were a unique house style briefly popular in the 1850s in the United States and Canada. They are characterised by an octagonal (eight-sided) plan, and often feature a flat roof and a veranda all round. Their unusual shape and appearance, quite different from the ornate pitched-roof houses typical of the period, can generally be traced to the influence of one man, amateur architect and lifestyle pundit Orson Squire Fowler. Although there are other octagonal houses worldwide, the term octagon house usually refers specifically to octagonal houses built in North America during this period, and up to the turn of the century.

Octagon House was written in 1937 and is the 11th book in the series. The book has some interesting features. The first chapter starts out in the new WPA library - one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's ideas to help Americans out of the Depression was to create work - the Works Project Administration or WPA, and one of these was to paint murals in post offices across the land.

The lead character has spent all her life hunting for ambergris (a whale discharge that was much used in making perfumes and was extremely valuable). When she finally finds some..enough to make her fortune, it is so waterlogged that she can't lift it out of the surf. Along comes her hated sister, who agrees to help her...for a price.



Asey Mayo books
The Cape Cod Mystery - 1931
Death Lights a Candle - 1932
The Mystery of the Cape Cod Players - 1933
The Mystery of the Cape Cod Tavern - 1934
Sandbar Sinister - 1934
Deathblow Hill - 1935
The Tinkling Symbol - 1935
The Crimson Patch - 1936
Out of Order - 1936
Figure Away - 1937
Octagon House - 1937
The Annulet of Gilt - 1938
Banbury Bog - 1938
Spring Harrowing - 1939
The Criminal C.O.D. - 1940
The Deadly Sunshade - 1940
The Perennial Boarder - 1941
The Six Iron Spiders - 1942
Three Plots for Asey Mayo (novelets) - 1942
Going, Going, Gone - 1943
Proof of the Pudding - 1943
The Asey Mayo Trio (novelets) - 1946
Punch with Care - 1946
Diplomatic Corpse - 1951

Beginning With A Bash, by Phoebe Atwood Taylor

Beginning With A Bash is the first Leonidas Witherall novel, for all that it didn't appear in the United States until 1972.

It started life as a novella, "The Problem of Volume 4" in the first issue of a short-lived mystery magazine edited by by Ellery Queen (Manfred Lee and Frederic Dannay), Mystery League Magazine, in November 1931. In 1936 Taylor wrote to her publisher asking if it could not be published as a novel, as she desperately needed the money. (This was the height of the Depression, and even though her Asey Mayo novels were selling well, taxes on her property were going up.)

Her publisher advised against it. If she had two books coming out in the same year, her audience might believe she was sacrificing quality for quantity. Also, since it had already appeared in print previously, "the Federal Trade Commission" might get involved.

So, although Beginning With a Bash was published in England in 1937, it was not published in the States until 1972. (Taylor would die four years later, at the age of 67.) Phoebe Atwood Taylor wrote at least a book a year from 1931 (her first Asey Mayo mystery) to 1947, with a final novel appearing in 1951.

I prefer Taylor's Leonidas Witherall mysteries (written under the ALice TIlton pseudonym) to her Asey Mayo books. Here's how a writer at Wikipedia describes them:

Leonidas Witherall ("the man who looks like Shakespeare"), once an instructor at a private boys' school, has lost all of his money due to the Wall Street crash of 1929, and takes to anonymously writing books and, later, a radio show about the adventures of "Lieutenant Hazeltine" as a means of survival, while solving murders as a sideline. In the eight novels chronicling his adventures, Witherall is confronted with a corpse under unusual and maximally embarrassing circumstances that suggest his own guilt, requiring him to enlist a motley crew of assistants, use disguise and impersonation to escape discovery, and engage in at least one scavenger-hunt-like chase before solving the crime. Once in every novel, Witherall references the radio program's constant repetition of "Cannae" -- an ancient battle from which Hazeltine draws inspiration so that his smaller force defeats his larger mass of enemies. This mention of Cannae means that Witherall is about to marshal his assistants as part of a clever scheme to deliver the murderer to justice. Hazeltine is also subject to the machinations of the "octopus of fate", by which an incredible coincidence is explained at least once in every Witherall novel. In 1944, the character was adapted into a Mutual radio mystery program, The Adventures of Leonidas Witherall.

Mystery critic Dilys Winn had this to say about the Witherall novels: "These books don't make all that much sense, but they go a long way in proving that making sense is immaterial -- a guffaw is more vital. Tilton books are so busy, so complicated, so Marx Brothers ... that makes them sound as if they might have a plot, doesn't it? Bad assumption. They drift from incident to incident with the style of the crash 'em cars at a carnival."[1] Mystery writer and critic H. R. F. Keating wrote, in an introduction to a 1987 reissue of the first Witherall novel, "If a writer can keep in play an interest in a crime of some sort, preferably indeed murder, and at the same time induce the reader to take the hither-and-thither balloon flight of farce, then the entertainment provided will be not doubled but tripled. But it is difficult. I suspect that the only recipe for success is sheer deftness in writing, coupled perhaps with establishing a firm basis in fact before the hilarious fantasy is allowed to take off. Both these elements Alice Tilton has at her disposal.

Although Witherall looks like Bill Shakespeare in this first installment, the rest of the familiar trappings have not been introduced. It is not until The Cut Direct that Witherall has started writing the Haseltine books, and using the Cannae solution to solve every problem.

For that reason, Beginning With A Bash is my least favorite Witherall novel, but still a fun book. The solution is a bit... unbelievable...but if you suspend your disbelief, you'll enjoy it.

A few paragraphs:

Leonidas twirled his pince-nez on their broad black ribbon, and Dot, with terror in her eyes, watched Martin's drawn face.

Martin cleared his throat. "I didn't do it. He--he was dead when I went back there!"

"Are you quite sure the man is dead, Martin?"

"Positive, sir. I looked at him. And I've spent hours--well, it seemed like hours though I s'pose it was only a few minutes--wondering whether to bolt or not. But I decided it would only make matters worse."

"Why should you bolt?" Dot demanded.

"Why? My God, why? I didn't think that anything more could happen, but here it is. Bill Shakespeare, what'll I do? I've fussed around and cursed North and talked about bashing him ever since I was first arrested. Now--whoops! Grand larceny, vagrancy, theft---and now murder! I didn't do any of 'em! I didn't do this. But no one'll ever believe me!"

"But who could have done it?" Dot looked dazedly around the store as though she expected to find the murderer on the ceiling or between the pages of a book.